Our daughter, Gwen, is a freshman away at college. She hasn’t voluntarily called us since she left home almost 3 months ago. I guess there’s something wrong with that fancy new cell phone we bought her, because apparently it can’t make calls from her area code into the dead zones surrounding our house and office. Boy, where is that “Can you hear me now?” guy when you need him?

My husband, Bill, has figured out a way to keep in touch. He sends little texts every once in a while, and she usually replies.

I don’t like texting. Unless you need to drop a message like “pls pik up mlk”, why wouldn’t you just call the person? It’s a lot easier. Texting is a lot of work. It takes me forever to pick out the tiny letters, and I can never remember that you use a different key, not shift, to get the symbols.

Another reason I don’t like to text the girls, is I just know that will encourage them to text while driving, thereby causing a fatal accident. Gwen doesn’t actually have a car at school, but she could very well walk into the street, or tumble down the stairs or into an open manhole while texting.

Texting has gotten out of control. Kids will sit next to one another and text instead of talking. That click, click, click is the new noise pollution.

I keep telling Gwen, in another 50 years she’s going to have the carpel tunnel so bad, she won’t be able to function. After all, opposable thumbs are what differentiated us from all the rest of the animals, and allowed us to stand upright, and use tools and evolve into people who invented cars and the Sham-wow. (There are some monkeys and lemurs and sloths who have opposable thumbs on their feet as well as their hands. They can hang from trees and open coconuts with their feet. By strict evolutionary logic, they should be twice as advanced as man, since they have twice as many opposable thumbs. But we are still king of the jungle. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you only-evolution and no-God types.)

We’re going to end up with an entire generation of people who can’t work because they have crippled their thumbs by texting. Everyone will be on Social Security disability at once, and this will put a tremendous burden on the system. In 50 years our country will go bankrupt, thereby ending the reign of the United States of America as a world leader. We will dwindle from a super power to a third-rate country because there will be nobody with thumbs to do any work. We will fall just like Rome to the Vandals – or was it the Visigoths? I always get them confused. Everyone will have to learn Chinese, which is really tough because they don’t say the “r” sound like we do.

And I can only thank God that by then I won’t have to pay to support all these selfish, texting teenagers turned thumbless, lie-abouts because I will be dead! Or at least so senile that all I’ll care about is finger painting with my own feces. In any event, whether dead or senile, I won’t be very aware of my surroundings, so let me take the opportunity now to say in advance that I TOLD YOU SO!